travelling knitting

This is what I knit when we travel - whenever there's a reasonably long car ride, Tim takes the wheel and I put in some time on my Tibetan Clouds (un)Beaded Stole. Clearly, we haven't been travelling much because it's the first time that I have picked it up since December of last year.

Nonetheless, I am determined to get this finished this year. Three years really is the maximum length of time that I can tolerate a project being on the go. This one is only 27 months at the moment but I do know how long these things can drag out unless I really put some effort into it. I managed half a repeat today which means that I have three-and-a-half repeats to go, that I could foreseeably complete it in a week at half a repeat per day, that I ... just need to keep knitting.

duffers

This was one of those attempts at quick knitting satisfaction that actually worked - very quick, very satisfying!

The Vital Statistics
Pattern: Duffers - revisited by Mindie Tallack.
Size: I knit the US 3 size but felted them down to about a US 1.
Yarn: Cascade 220 in '7803 magenta' and '9404 ruby' (100 per cent wool), 0.4 skeins and .17 skeins respectively; Knit Picks Wool of the Andes (100 per cent wool). Yarn was held double throughout which makes me think that you could do some nice ombré effects by holding two different colour yarns together and shading into a solid colour.
Needles: 8mm.
Start to finish: 14 March to 16 March 2013 with a couple of mistakes and rip backs and reknits.
Stash/recycle content: Yay, 100 per cent!

Comments: Mine are a bit of a colour mix because I ran out of the magenta and had to finish the sole with ruby, then ran out of cream and had to do the cast off in ruby again. But I completely used up two random, hanging-around-for-ages skeins of yarn - hooray. I also left out row 11 I think but not to too much detriment. Felting was hard work because I did it mostly by hand, thinking that my front loader wouldn't do the trick. Well, more being anxious about not being able to regularly check without draining the machine each time. I did end up putting them in for 20 minutes on a hot wash with a couple of towels which turned out to be the last nudge that they needed.

Verdict: Warm feet at our house. I wonder if that will make it any easier to get miss bear out of bed in the morning?

eris

The Vital Statistics
Pattern: Eris by Lisa Mutch of Northbound Knitting. 
Size: There's only one size in the pattern but it would be easily customisable. 
Yarn: Wollmeise "Pure" 100% Merino Superwash in the colours 'Admiral' (dark blue; 0.28 skeins) and a wd 'Oooohm' (the turquoise; 0.33 skeins) and madelinetosh tosh sock in 'tart' (red; 0.56 skeins). 
Needles: 4mm 

Start to finish: 19 November 2012 to 11 March 2013. It shouldn't really have taken that long but I got two-thirds of the way through and then it sat for a while. Quite a while. 
Stash/recycle content: nope. 

Comments: I don't often have trouble reading knitting patterns but this one gave me some grief. What does this mean to you?: "k to 1 st past last wrapped st". To me it means knit up to but not including the stitch after the wrapped stitch. But, I can sort of see how it might mean to knit until the first stitch past the wrapped stitch. No, not really. Anyway, the grief was indeed that I interpreted it as the former and found out many rows later that it meant the latter. Rip rip rip. 

There's also an error (in my opinion) in row 1 of section C. It should read k8 instead of k6, otherwise the numbers just don't add up. 

Also, I picked up the wrapped stitches along the change from section 1 to section 2, as it helped to preserve a smooth line. 

This was my first time knitting with Wollmeise. I had a bit of a panic attack upon returning to Australia that I would never be able to find gourmet yarn again. Never fear, turns out that quite a few local ravellers are selling theirs off and I now own quite a few skeins. The Wollmeise colours are fantastic but I found the yarn itself to be a bit splitty.

Verdict: Once the pattern is clear to you (!) this is very easy, albeit slightly monotonous, knitting. The result is a really great shape, best seen in the shot of it blocking. I think often of Di's comment about my knitting choices, that I knit for texture as opposed to shape (Di, that's going to stay with me forever, probably because it was so apposite). This knit went quite some way to showing me why - textural knitting is exciting, absorbing, engaging, yarn-over, knit-two-together, pass-the-slipped-stitch-over knitting.

Graphic knitting (for want of a better term) is just a lot of knit knit knitting, little bit of shaping, knit knit knitting, wrap and turn, knit knit knitting. Not that I have anything against knitting, obviously, but garter stitch never achieves the flow that stocking stitch does, particularly stocking stitch in the round. There are a lot of wonderful garter stitch shawls around at the moment, several that I have under consideration, but I really need to give that particular knitting a break for a bit.

the sixty-five per cent barrier

I'm sorry that I haven't been around much. Sorry, of course, to not be putting anything much up here but also a bit sorry for myself, to be neglecting this recording aspect of my creative (do I dare say it?) practice. Going back to work has put a bit of a rock in the pond and I'm still waiting for the ripples to adjust and settle.

I've also been up against a sixty-five per cent barrier recently - I get about that far through a project and just lose interest. I keep casting on new small projects in the hope of a quick completion fix and then they too fall by the wayside. How appropriate then that I have just cast off Eris and may this signify the end to any lingering discord.

The wall in the background is kindly provided by the Museum Victoria where we hid yesterday from the ongoing heat that is plaguing Melbourne. Unfortunately, it's going to be a tad cooler tomorrow, just when I was intending to block it (cooler, huh! 29C instead of 36C, that is 84F instead of 97F).

february reading

I did a lot of reading last month. Partly enabled by reading young adult fiction which does go really quickly. I got a bee in my bonnet (huh, again?) about a book that I read when I was young which included a boat ride along a canal and through a lock. That was all I could remember, and that they were on the run. I consulted the good people on AbeBooks BookSleuth forum - cannot recommend this enough if you are searching for a lost title with only the slightest notion of the content; the collective knowledge or readers is amazing - and found what I was looking for!


The Silver Sword by Ian Seraillier - A book I certainly read when I was younger and I thought was the canal book but no. There is a canoe ride down the Danube and, curiously, for a book about post-WWII displacement and prison camps, no mention of Jewish people whatsoever.
        
Ashes to Dust by Yrsa Sigurdardottir - Icelandic crime thriller, a good one but I did guess one of the plot devices way in advance.

A Stranger in Mayfair by Charles Finch - British historical crime thriller, a good one but again, I guessed the plot device in advance. Perhaps I'm reading too many of these?

Thursday's Child by Noel Streatfeild - My second attempt at finding the canal book. Nope, and not worth reading. Really crappy Victorian orphanage, completely two-dimensional characters. And boring.

The Girl who Kicked the Hornets' Nest by Stieg Larsson - Very long and read in three days. Great.

The Devil's Children and Heartsease by Peter Dickinson -These are parts one and two of the Changes Trilogy. Fantastic slightly science-fiction/fantasy, dystopic future setting, great characters, great writing. And yes, Heartsease was the canal book of my youth.

butterflies

I had butterflies in my tummy before I went back to work. How fitting then, that on my first day I wore a blouse that I made myself from this butterfly print fabric. This butterfly print fabric that comes from a French Connection blouse that I picked up at Buffalo Exchange in the U District completely on a whim because I loved the fabric and thought that I could make something out of it.

Unfortunately, with a couple of muck-ups along the way, I wasn't able to make something out of it alone because I ran out of fabric and then had to stalk ebay to buy another dress and another blouse and a skirt too actually because the previous owner washed the dress with something nigh corrosive and the fabric was bleached out and ... suffice to say, there were no savings made here, fabric-wise.

But the fabric is gorgeous. You can ever so faintly see the self-stripe, it's 100 per cent cotton, great weight and drape, adorable print and no, doesn't suit me at all. I've mostly always worn single colour tops and blouses and t-shirts and there's a reason - I'm just not a printed blouse wearing sort. I did wear it to work, the first day, but only out of pure obstinacy because, yes, I'm like that.

ps: And those pre-first-day-back-at-workbutterflies? It took ten days and a dose of antibiotics to get rid of them. Ugh.

everybody wants to work

"oh no, not me"

Oh, I was going to set out a 2013 agenda and maybe review last year's output a bit more and planned to catalogue absolutely everything that I have on the go and every single idea that I have bouncing around in my head but it all seemed like too much work and I kept putting it off. And then I went back to work; paid work, office work, commute-to-the-city-by-train work, swipe-my-security-pass work. After five years of variously leave without pay, long service leave, maternity leave and extended family leave (yes, we have all those things in Australia). And this will be my new baby.

And on the first day I wore a blouse that I sewed myself, a blouse that fit me just right across the bust (that was about all that was just right about it - I forgot to sew the gap up above the zip, the sleeves were badly finished, it wasn't quite long enough, didn't suit me and I didn't like it at all anymore by the time I finished it but, by golly, I wore it, because 14 months ago when we decided to return to Australia and I knew that I would go back to work, I resolved to wear a blouse that I had sewed on my first day back. And I did. The fact that I put the zip in the night before is just some indication of my ambivalence about the whole process. More on that all another time.)

Anyway, work, two days a week. Just like last time.

2012(.16666666666666667ish)

Finally, the end of 2012. Although, looking back I see that I was even later in 2012 with the 2011 wrap-up than I am now with the 2012 wrap-up - oh, whatever.

Here's what I was aiming for:

- read at least one book each month
- craft mostly from stash (I aspire to 'only from stash' but then, I'm also realistic)
- finish things

Here's what I did:

27 - number of books read (and at least one every month)
24 - number of finished projects (17 knitted, 3 crocheted, 4 sewn)
13 - number of finished projects crafted from stash or thrifted materials (a pleasant surprise, that's more than half!)
2 - number of long-term projects completed, Baudelaire socks and Babette blanket (respectively, 3.5 years and, oh, only one and a bit)
2 - number of times I completed Cladonia
12 - number of items made for others or given away

1 - number of heart-rending, mind-bending international moves made. I haven't really written much about this, about the dislocation, the discombobulation. Maybe it's that I'm still processing it, or processing it in small, incremental ways that don't warrant a mention in themselves but all add up to a greater picture of where we are now and where we have been. Four-and-a-half months and already the whole experience of living in the US, the four-and-a-half years of it, seems like a dream. Making that photo-mosaic, looking at those photos taken on my kitchen windowsill - sob.

I'm a bit disappointed with my output last year, but hey, those last four months were a write-off and I'm only now getting all of my sewing stuff unpacked. I think I'm ready to buy a sewing machine which is very exciting. So, yeah:

3 - number of machines left behind in the US: sewing machine, overlocker and cover-stitch machine - sob.

january reading

A Lion Among Men by Gregory Maguire - the third volume in the Wicked Years series, not my favourite so far but still a great read.
Does My Head Look Big in This? by Randa Abdel-Fattah - an entertaining and often amusing read, seems to be very biographical, about a sixteen-year old and aimed at a similar age group. Needed better editing as it was just that bit too long.

the magic flute

A change in tempo, have added some colourful notes:

There's some very fetching pale pink to follow then dark blue, light blue (with a texture change too) and then some more green. It's fun to see the colours coming together and the effect that each new stripe has on the whole (as it always is with colourwork) but really, I would like it to be over already.

Am also thinking about what I might like to do in the centre there - I don't much like that flat dark blue disk effect. It might be fun to crochet a covered button in one of the brighter colours and affix that in the centre.

i hear a flamingo fluting *

My knitting/crocheting is all over the place at the moment. I am desperate to finish something, just anything, so I keep casting on small (and not so small) projects, looking for quick satisfaction. Which is, of course, not forthcoming as everything gets stalled, or I get distracted or ... what was I talking about?

This is the beginning of the Pretty Fluted Cushion in Crochet by Madame Weigel. It's a vintage pattern and certainly doesn't make sense on row 4 and the colour progression in the illustration doesn't match that in the pattern and that lovely fluted effect is the result of there already being 252 stitches on the very first row of the vandykes (as they are referred to; that is, each spiky petal). Fortunately, the stitch count doesn't increase for some 16 rows and then by not much but that gentle progression from a few cast-on stitches to many hundreds is certainly missing. And the whole thing is done in double crochet (single crochet in the New World), not treble (translate: double crochet) as I thought so it's pretty laborious hooking. Anyway, I've since done another row of dark blue and one of red and it's looking simply smashing if I may say so myself. Is that suitable 1930s terminology?

(And it's using up a lot of stash yarn in which dear Babette, bless her heart, barely made a dint.)

 * fluting in my ear - we love the Bill Martin Jnr/Eric Carle collaborations.

family portrait

Mother and baby, reunited!

Exactly the same pattern but mama was knit with two strands held together of Moda Vera Husky and baby Pachelbel just the one.

solar flare

It's been sunny here lately.

The Vital Statistics
Pattern: Crochet Flower Hot Pad by FreeCraft Unlimited, free (thank you!).
Size: One size. 
Yarn: Sugar'n Cream Solids & Denim by Lily (100 per cent cotton), colours 1109 (yellow) and 18046 (rose pink); about 0.15 of a skein each.
Crochet hook: 4mm.
Start to finish: 9 January to 11 January 2013.
Stash/recycle content: Yes, from stash. I have blue somewhere too that I would have preferred to use with the yellow but no matter.

Comments: This was a case of 'new house, need new crochet hot pad', actually, just need crochet hot pad altogether. This sits on top of the oven and is the resting place for my Michael Graves designer kettle. The incongruity of this does not escape me. This is a well written pattern, fun to crochet and can actually look quite chic and graphic in one solid colour with a contrasting trim.
Verdict: I wonder if Alessi would consider doing them in black and white? black and grey? grey and white?

monster doily from the deep

Ok, we're halfway through January and I feel as though I am catching up with myself a bit. So, a huge chunk of 2012 for us was taken up with moving - moving house, moving country, moving time zone - and that took up a lot of mental space and time and effort.

We are now nicely settled in a rental property in Hampton East in Melbourne and the decorating challenge is just how much homemade stuff is required, possible or appropriate. Hence the bathmats.

The Vital Statistics
Pattern: Liz Snella's Heirloom Doily by Vintage from Yarn Over free (thank you!)  
Size: Just the one size and mine ended up huge, 60cm (23.5") across. I omitted the loopy crochet cast off. 
Yarn: This time I used Moda Vera Bamboo/Cotton (70 per cent bamboo, 30 per cent cotton) in colourway indigo; 7.5 skeins.
Needles: 7mm. 
Start to finish: 24 December 2012 to 7 January 2013. 
Stash/recycle content: No.


Comments: I knit this with 4 strands held together (and again, way too small needles for the job to get a dense fabric). Knitting a doily pattern as a bathmat is a great reason to do some very textural lace. I was a little concerned that the bamboo/cotton mix might be too slippery on the floor but it's fine (speaking of which, our house has the original bathroom and it's fabulous - the original floor tile, pink bath and blue tiles with some burgundy accents on there and round windows in the doors. It's awesome.)

I should perhaps have cast off purlwise (instead of knitwise) but there's no way that I'm wrestling with this knitting again - it was unwieldy - and while I was working on it, the love just wasn't there. And the ends could have been better dealtwith. Getting it off the needles was a pleasant surprise because ...

Verdict: I'm very happy with it.

pachelbel

I love the name Pachelbel but it's not one you get to use often, unless you're a music buff naming a toy pachiderm.

The Vital Statistics
Pattern: Elephant by Bonnie Gosse and Jill Allerton from the great first knitting book, aptly named A First Book of Knitting for Children.  
Size: The pattern only provides for one size so it depends on what weight yarn you use. 
Yarn: Moda Vera Husky (100 per cent baby alpaca) in colourway 5 'dark grey'; 1 skein. 
Needles: It's a bulky yarn but I knit it with 2.75mm needles to get a really solid fabric so that the stuffing wouldn't show or leak through.

Start to finish: 15 December to 23 December 2012.

Stash/recycle content: Alas, no. Oh actually, a tiny little bit. The embroidery wool for the eyes was bought at the op shop!

Comments: I actually knit two elephants, this baby one and a larger one using two strands at once and a 4mm needle. Unfortunately, I was so excited with the finished product that I gave it away to the happy recipient without even taking a photo. I'll try to get one at a later date.

I knit only 12 rows for head and decreased 1 st at beg of the last 2 rows for the ears. I then sewed the ears on with tail of the cast on, starting at the side of the body and working up toward the crown of the head. Then I used from the cast off end to gather up the side of the ear. Both elephants were stuffed with wool roving.

Verdict: Adorable, but certainly hard on the hands to knit.

chunky crochet

One of these is still catching up with 2012, the other I just completed today.

 

The Vital Statistics

Pattern: By your bed/Bathmat/Doormat Rug - Free Crochet Pattern by Ooty Yaacobi  and

African Flower Hexagon Crochet Tutorial by Heidi Bears.

Size: One size; the bathmat you could make larger by working extra rounds.

Yarn: Moda Vera Beetle (50 per cent cotton, 50 per cent acrylic) in a particularly unpleasant shade of pink, eight strands held together, used five skeins; and off-white recycled cotton/acrylic, 2 strands held together.

Hook: 15mm and 10mm, respectively.

Start to finish: 16 December to 23 December 2012; 9 January to 10 January 2013.

Stash/recycle content: The African Flower motif was made from yarn recycled from a Perry Ellis sweater that I bought at Sacred Heart Mission Op Shop for $5.

Comments: I decided that we needed some bathmats, and because it's quick, I opted to try a couple out in crochet, and in a cotton/acrylic mix because I thought that it would dry and wear better. These are two free patterns so the quality of the instruction is a bit uneven.  The Ooty pattern is not very sophisticated (doesn't include instructions for turning chains) and the African Flower pattern goes into so much (extraneous) detail that it's almost confusing (clearly for absolute beginner or very nervous crocheter).

Verdict: Not great successes. The pink one has already met its demise (rubbish bin; couldn't stand the colour and shouldn't have worked with it in the first place but it was the best of a poor selection) and I will probably unravel the off-white motif in order to knit with it instead. There are many gorgeous examples of the African Flower motif out there, I think that doing it in an assortment of colours really helps.

Both projects were reasonably quick to make but the actual mechanics of working with such bulky yarn doesn't make for an enjoyable crafting experience and there's just not enough definition in chunky crochet (or maybe it's the cotton/acrylic mix). Won't be trying this again.

time warp

I've decided to put the new year off until next month. Is that ok?

So, to round the year out with something familiar:

The Vital Statistics

Pattern: Cladonia by Kristen Kapur of Through the Loops. Wonderful, gorgeous shawl. 

Size: The pattern only comes in one size but I increased the size and depth of mine - details below. 
Yarn: Brooklyn Tweed Loft in 'truffle hunt' (my absolute favourite), 'old world' and 'blanket fort'. I love that one speck of red in the 'old world'.

Needles: 4mm. 
Start to finish: 27 June to 19 December 2012. 
Recycle/stash content: Well, it's all recycled from the first Cladonia that I knit but I don't think that really counts ... 

Comments:  I made considerable changes to this pattern to achieve a shawl that was both deeper and larger (that is, just more surface area altogether). The increase in depth was achieved by making the body increases every sixth instead of every fourth row. If you are making a striped version, this means that the increase will occur on alternating main colour and contrast colour rows (whereas in the regular version the increases are always on a main colour row). These increases all occur on right side rows.

To also make the shawl larger you need to effectively add some segments to the shawl (pattern provides for eight segments, mine has ten and I've seen that some people have increased it to eleven). To achieve the two extra segments, I made twice as many edge increases, half of which occur on wrong side rows; that is, you increase every sixth row for depth but every third at the edge. result is that the first and last of the eight segments are double the size (making effectively 10 segments) and the finished shawl thus four lace repeats wider along the border.

You can see here the elongated first and last segments and overall altered shape here (and that we don't much bother to rake up our leaves):

In order to make these two changes, you also need to make some changes when you cast on. To make the shawl wider/larger, you need to have 2 extra set-up stitches. Knit garter tab as per instructions (10 stitches on the needles: 3 for the garter stitch edge, 4 for the body of the shawl, 3 for the garter stitch edge); then work kfbf into first and last of the shawl body stitches (instead of just kfb) and kfb into the 2 intervening stitches (16 stitches on needles instead of 14).

Lastly, on this version I didn't do the contrast colour row in the edging; didn't feel that it was necessary now that I got the colours in better balance. 

Verdict: I think that this is going to work for me now. I am delighted with the finished product and just need to wait for some cooler weather, or stand in the shade.

december reading

Phantom by  Jo Nesbø- indeed, can't get enough of these books, although (fortunately?) I will have to take a break and read something else now as this is the most recent in the series. I love the way these Harry hole narratives weave around, how the threads of stories overlap to no effect than other to demonstrate how life does that. Great reading, heart-rending ending.

october and november reading

The Redeemer, The Snowman and The Leopard, all by  Jo Nesbø - The escapism continues; the last two got a bit ridiculous actually but still loving reading them.
Son of a Witch by Gregory Maguire - Oh, that this series would go on forever. As it is, I am half-way through and both longing to and dreading reading the next volume as it would take me that much closer to the end. These books are wonderful reading.
The Schopenhauer Cure by Irvin Yalom - Didactic, a bit contrived, good reading.

hello dear blog

Hello dear blog readers (blog readers? anyone out there still?). It has been a while, change of country, change of time zone, change of residence - moving has quite taken it out of me. But I'm back to get the ball of yarn rolling because knitting continues, no matter what!

My Cladonia (remodelled) is currently blocking (and my fingertips are nigh bleeding after pinning out every one of those blasted little picots - ouch!). It is indeed much larger than the first one I knit, certainly wider but perhaps not quite as deep as I might have liked.

I have just realised that the first version was actually my first finished knit this year. I hope that it won't be my last; there are still 12 days left and I have some elephants coming along nicely.